The Beats were self-indulgent poseurs – but the new Ginsberg film is definitely worth seeing

This Friday, James Franco moves one step closer to completing his takeover of the known universe with the release of Howl, a film looking at the life of Allen Ginsberg and the eponymous poem that made his name. A big-name actor in a biopic of a well-known artist? Only one way this can go, right? We open on a childhood trauma which will manifest itself in the artist’s later work, before success brings its own tougher problems, then we propel to a redemptive climax where these demons are exorcised by the love of a good woman. Except that’s not what Howl does. Ginsberg was gay, for one thing.

No, instead of the usual tropes favoured by the likes of Ray and Walk the Line, Howl’s directors (documentary specialists Rob Epsteins and Jeffrey Friedman) do something different, and point the way for a far more nuanced approach to biographical movies than "man was unhappy, man became happy" reductivism. They split their film into four strands: Franco/Ginsberg reading his incendiary poem in a bar full of the “angelheaded hipsters” he wrote about; Franco/Ginsberg re-enacting real interviews, his words taken direct from transcripts; animated portions dramatising the poem’s hallucinatory imagery,;and dramatisations of the obscenity trial it faced, again taken from transcripts. And while it may not have the Oscar-baiting uplift of Johnny Cash reuniting with June Carter, or Ray Charles kicking heroin, Howl does point in a new direction for the true-life flick.

While there’s little doubt that their makers are in it for the right reasons, most biopics get their funding based on the name-recognition their subject can bring. The money men don’t see any subject in terms of cultural impact – as with a comic book adaptation or a sequel, the key goal is brand recognition, making the marketers’ job easier and supposedly reducing financial risk. A known superstar is slotted into the proven redemptive formula, out it comes, and the cycle repeats itself. That’s why movies get made about Johnny Cash, and not Rednex. But isn’t there a sense of over-familiarity, of diminishing returns? A film about a revered artist may entertain with the pleasure of seeing choice moments re-enacted, but how much do you actually learn about them, aside from the fact they all, y’know, just wanted to be loved?

Howl takes a different tack, and good on it for doing so. We’re systematically taken through the context of Ginsberg’s own life as he was writing, the poem itself, and the reaction of straight society. Sure, the Beats may seem self-indulgent poseurs today, but at least they were trying something new, and the film makes a convincing case that Ginsberg shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. It has an argument to make about its subject, a stance, and unlike soapy melodramas which favour backstage gossip, it never loses sight of why this person was worth making a film about in the first place. Nobody’s saying there aren’t pleasures in old-school fist-punching endings, but isn’t it more honest to cut the Hollywood BS, and broaden these biopics out from being slightly more cerebral versions of Rocky?